Markeshia Ricks Photos
Williams and Winter: vying for Ward 21 seat.
When Rodney “Rock” Williams watches the demolition of the last vestiges of the former Winchester Arms plant in Newhallville, he sees more than childhood memories and the neighborhood’s past slipping away. He sees the alarming potential for the neighborhood’s political power to slip away too.
That’s one of the reasons, he said, that he’s running for alder in Ward 21.
When Steve Winter discovered that fewer than 10 percent of city cops walk the beat, he saw a problem with “community policing.” When he saw other parts of the city getting LED lights and trimmed trees — but not Florence Virtue Homes — he saw an inequity. Those are reasons he is running for alder in Ward 21.
The two candidates bring two different life stories and organizing backgrounds to the race: Williams grew up here, owns a contracting business, has spoken up regularly for more local hiring on development projects. Winter came here to study at Yale, fell in love with the city, and has devoted himself to political organizing around climate change and cooperative housing. Both candidates have spoken up about policing reform in New Haven
Ward 21 extends from the heart of Newhallville into East Rock. The seat is up for grabs for the first time since 2011. Incumbent Brenda Foskey-Hill has decided to retire. Williams is the endorsed candidate in the upcoming Nov. 7 general election; Winter is running as an independent.
Mr. Rock Drywall
Williams makes a point at a meeting of the mayor’s Task Force on Police and Community Relations.
Williams, a 51-year-old contractor who owns Mr. Rock Drywall on Dixwell Avenue, grew up in Newhallville. He arrived here when he was 11 or 12 years old from Brooklyn and never left, he said.
The father of eight children and six grandchildren who all live in New Haven, he said the ward needs a leader who will make sure the neighborhood gets more than pretty housing that nobody from the city can afford.
He said that should start with a new housing development at the 13-acre site of the former Winchester Repeating Arms factory at 201 Munson St. The project is expected to bring nearly 400 apartments to the community. Developers told neighbors in a meeting last Thursday that so far their plans call for about 10 percent of those, or around 39, to be affordable, or workforce housing. Williams wants to see that number of affordable housing units in the project increased.
Some — including outgoing Alder Foskey-Hill — welcome the development. They say it will transform the blighted factory in the neighborhood into something new. Others in the neighborhood spurn it as upscale housing for out-of-towners.
But Williams said there is more at stake for a community where fewer than 500 voters consistently turn out for local elections.
“This right now to me is a tsunami warning,” Williams said while watching an excavator claw down the sides of the old Munson Street factory one recent day. “It’s happening all around our city and it’s happening here. The political landscape of Newhallville is going to change if we allow it.”
Williams said recognizing that the development, when full, could be home to hundreds of voting-age people — and seeing how that might affect the future of local elections — was an eye opener for him. Ward 21 has historically been represented by people with roots in the neighborhood, more specifically black people with roots in the community.
“When I realized how many people it takes to become an alder, and that this project by itself could have that amount of new, registered voters, and that they alone could decide the alder just right here, I had to stand up,” he said. “There could be 500, 700 new voters right here. And they could swing an election if the whole community doesn’t come out to vote, and historically they haven’t come out.”
Williams hasn’t publicly endorsed the Munson Street project. He said he has had extensive conversations with the developers and pressed them to hire locally, particularly when it comes to contractors. Such jobs could cover demolition to maintenance.
He said he also pressed the developers to be good neighbors by making additional investments in other parts of the community, by helping people to start businesses, and by finding ways to develop other vacant lots in the community. Running for alder means he can’t enjoy the fruits of such advocacy for contractors, but he said he’s doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
“We can’t stop this project but what we can do is leverage this project to help the rest of the community,” Williams said. “Because other than this, we have nothing going on in our community. So let’s leverage this to help us.”
Williams acknowledged that the Munson Street project will have a hefty price tag because of the environmental clean-up process; he said he’s heard the figure is $100 million. But he said the leverage he’s talking about looks like figuring out how to make sure the project still pays off for people in the neighborhood, first in the form of jobs, but also in the form of having a certain percentage of that cost reinvested in the community in meaningful ways.
“If a certain amount of money does not impact this community it is not a good project for this community,” he said.
Thomas Macmillian File Photo
Williams pressing for local hiring in 2014.
Williams, who is in his second term as Ward 21’s Democratic co-chair and as a member of the state Commission on Economic Competitiveness, said regardless of who wins the alder race, he’s still going to be making waves when they need to be made.
A product of New Haven Public Schools, Williams is known to turn up at school board meetings as an advocate for skill-based, vocational curricula, often pointing out that everyone isn’t going to college or the military. He also serves on Mayor Toni Harp’s Task Force for Police and Community Relations, where he has advocated for reforms that weed out bad cops. Such advocacy touches both sides of the ward, he said. And he doesn’t plan to stop such activism.
“I’m from here and I feel like I have a conscience,” he said. “And when I see something that’s going to impact our community, I’m going to speak about it.
“We can’t forget about the fact that it’s not just Newhallville. It’s East Rock. We can’t always look at it as two. It’s one,” he added. “We need to bridge the two together and become one strong ward. They need to decide who is capable of building that bridge between the community, and I feel like that’s what I want to do. At the end of the day, we can’t stop change. Should our city grow? Yes, it should grow. But should it grow in the city and not grow in our community? No, it should not. So, that’s what I’m going to do in our community — make sure we grow like everybody else grows.”
When Williams talks about how the ward has changed in his lifetime, he gets emotional because he said the opportunities being created in the city are passing its residents by, just like the people he sees walking and biking to Science Park from their new apartments in the neighborhood.
“I’ve been sitting out here for an hour and for those don’t realize that change is coming, change is already here,” he said Tuesday. “As we sit here and speak, I’ve seen five people walking from Munson Street to Yale. And I have not seen one black person walk from here to Yale. When there’s work right there. When you look at New Haven, is this New Haven, or is this a new New Haven?”
Williams said he’s not against change when it works in the favor of the community that already exists. And he said the change that’s happening all over the city and now in Ward 21 should work for more than just the people coming across the Q Bridge each day.
“This is where I’m from. I didn’t move here,” Williams added. “There are people who have come to this city when they were grown. I’ve been here ever since I was a kid. In this community. My friends live here, their kids live here, their grandkids are here. When you look at somebody running for a community, fighting for a community, I’m fighting for my community. I didn’t move here and look around and get a conscience. I grew up here. There’s a big difference in you coming here and seeing what’s going on, and you growing up here and watching it disappear.”
“Excuse Me, Sir …”
Winter puts in a little elbow grease on Towsend Street.
“Excuse me, sir. Can you fix my handlebars?” the little boy asked when he saw the bearded and bespectacled Steve Winter walking down Townsend Street this past Thursday.
The child didn’t know Winter’s name but had seen him before, likely canvassing the neighborhood talking to people about his candidacy and registering them to vote.
“Maybe,” Winter replied. The handlebars of the boy’s bike were pushed deeply close to the seat almost parallel, making the bike hard to ride properly.
“Well, let me sit on there,” Winter said. “I wish I had my tools.
After sitting down and trying to push the bars back into their proper, upright position, Winter said, “That’s tough. How’d you do it?”
Before the boy could answer, his friend replied, “He slammed it like a dumb idiot.”
“I got mad,” the boy said sheepishly. “When I get mad I throw stuff.”
“Wow, you must be really strong,” Winter said. Then with the boys holding one end of the bike and Winter tightly gripping the handlebars, all of a sudden, they popped into proper position.
“Oooh! How’d you do that?” the boy exclaimed.
“You guys were helping me do it,” Winter said. “We did it together.”
The scene could be a metaphor for Winter’s campaign to be the next alder of Ward 21. Originally from Rhode Island, he came to New Haven to study philosophy at Yale back in 2007 and fell in love with the Elm City.
He met his wife, Emily, at a folk festival in Edgerton Park. He started his first entrepreneurial attempt here when he ran a home painting business. Winter also had his first encounter with the long arm of the law when he was arrested as part of the Elevate Lounge police raid back in 2010.
That incident fueled his becoming a community organizer and activist on the issue of police reform. He currently manages operations at Catalyst Cooperative, which focuses on climate and energy policy, and volunteers with National Popular Vote CT.
“Getting more engaged politically, both in Connecticut and during my time in Colorado, shined a light on how much local politics can change one’s well-being,” he said.
Winter and his wife moved briefly to Boulder, Colo., where his wife is from, so she could recover from ovarian cancer. They lived in a housing cooperative. He found himself organizing to pass an ordinance that made cooperatives an exception to a law in that city that made it illegal for more than three unrelated people to live together.
“Having a really diligent, hardworking, responsive local representative can really make a world of difference in the quality of one’s life living in the city,” Winter said. “When the opportunity [to run] came up, I thought, ‘Wow, this would be a meaningful way to get engaged.’ It’s been awesome. There are so many amazing people in each corner of our ward.”
The 28-year-old lives with his wife and their cats and a dog named Toly on Prospect Hill. He said the biggest issues he hears about, apart from traffic calming, are creating opportunities for young people through after-school and summer programs.
“I think it’s pretty clear there’s a need for that,” he said. “As I’m, like, walking and biking around the ward, there are tons of kids keeping themselves busy, totally unsupervised, and I think we need a place for them to go. We need opportunities that are going to let them burn some of that energy off. And also learn new things.”
Though the Q House is coming back to Dixwell Avenue, Winter said parents have expressed discomfort with their kids traveling to get there. He said he’d like to see more opportunities close to home, such as the youth center proposed by Believe in Me Empowerment Corp. founder James Walker and possibly an expansion of what’s being done at ConnCAT.
“Are there ways that we can support an excellent program like that, that’s a real model?” he said. “Are there ways that we can support and expand that kind of programming? I think they’re tough questions, particularly as the state and the city face tightening budgets, but they’re ones that I would really want to look into in a really meaningful way to try to figure out what we can do. I don’t have all the answers on that but it’s something I’d want to work really, really hard on.
“It’s by far the number one concern in the ward,” he added.
Safe streets and the speed of traffic are also concerns he’s heard across the ward and the city.
“Everywhere I go, from Dixwell to Newhallville to East Rock, folks are asking about ways that we can calm traffic, whether that’s speed bumps, or bumping the curbs out, or protected bike lanes,” he said. “Folks want to feel safe when their kids are out, and especially if you have elderly nearby. There are a lot of people, young and old, who are biking and they kind of feel like they’re rolling the dice every time they ride their bikes.”
He said safe streets look like sidewalks that don’t point dangerously to the sky and roads without small craters in them. It also looks like trimmed trees and LED lights for Florence Virtue Homes.
“We’ve got a huge swath of Florence Virtue that hasn’t gotten trees trimmed, hasn’t gotten potholes filled and hasn’t gotten new streetlights,” he said. “The rest of the city got these LED lights, but Florence Virtue is a black hole. If you go down Winter Street,” which he jokingly referred to as Namesake Street, “at night, it’s incredibly dark. It’s the darkest street in the whole ward.
“Folks in Newhallville really want to feel like they live in a safe neighborhood, which is not too much to ask when you live in a neighborhood,” he added.
Winter said those nuts and bolts, ward-level problems are what he wants to work on with his neighbors as their alder. But he also sees an opportunity as an alder and an activist to press for police reform and a strong civilian review board. At a community meeting last month at the Stetson Library with Police Chief Anthony Campbell, Winter said he learned that of the 450 officers in the department, less than 10 percent walk the beat. That didn’t sound like community policing to him.
“Numerically, that’s not a strong commitment to community policing,” he said. “Part of the reason I want to run as an independent is I feel like it would be the best way to get to know folks directly and to represent them directly. But I think it also, hopefully, will provide a platform to start conversations like this and really press the police in public settings.”
Newhallville kids need places of their own, Winter said.
Winter said if he were elected alder, he would want to be deeply involved in shaping the new civilian review board into one that’s independent, has the power to do its own investigations, can work with the Board of Alders to get testimony, and at the very least can make recommendations about discipline.
“It’s big things like folks who say they’ve been beaten and abused and it’s little things like an unwarranted traffic stop,” Winter said. “I think we need to change the culture of policing in New Haven, which I think has come a long way. We do need a civilian review board. Community policing should start with the community overseeing the police. We’ve got to make time for it.
“The police are such an intimate part of the fabric of life in New Haven, we need to see more cops out and about getting to know folks,” he added. “I think that’s where it starts, and I think where it ends is with community members being involved with investigating cases of potential police misconduct. Not every one of those cases is going to be a case where the city has $9.5 million on the line but they’re cases where peoples’ lives are impacted in a deep and meaningful way. My little encounter with the police really did change the course of my life. And repeated interactions can really change one’s psyche.”
Like Williams, Winter said he seeks to bridge the two sides of the ward, which is divided by race, class, and geography. But he’s skeptical of the theory that a new development like the Munson Street project could shift the political power in the neighborhood. He’s skeptical because of the low voter turnout of the people who currently live in Winchester Lofts. He said the data he’s seen shows that maybe four people participated in the most recent Democratic primary.
“It’s this tug-of-war where you’ve got new development, but also those inhabitants coming from Yale communities that are politically transient in some sense,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a guarantee that there would be some large shift in political power. I think that has more to do with the fabric of a block or neighborhood and what kind of long-term investments folks have in a place.
“That’s not to say renters can’t play a positive role in the community,” he added. “I’ve been a renter and know lots of folks who rent and do amazing work in the community. But I think homeownership in a lot of communities plays a role in shaping the long-term fabric of the block. And that’s something we wouldn’t see with that development. It’s hard to say what kind of folks it would attract, with 10 percent affordable, it seems like it could very well attract more folks like Winchester, where there isn’t a huge boost in participation. You’d probably get more participation out of a short street like Harding Street or Ford Street where you have lots of longtime renters and homeowners.”
So Winter’s focus isn’t on the development’s potential political impact, but the traffic nightmare that it could create for a part of the city that has one of the most complicated convergences of streets. He also wants to maintain the legacy of responsiveness of the outgoing alder.
“Any community member I’ve met who has interacted with Brenda has said, ‘Wow, she’s so responsive and so helpful.’ And I would really want to try to continue that legacy of openness, responsiveness, and really tough hard work that Brenda has brought to the seat,” Winter said. “But I also think there is more that we can do to bring the different corners of the ward together around issues that are immediately apparent to be shared issues, like speed bumps. But also the two sides of the coin when you go talk to somebody on Whitney and they say, ‘I’m really worried about car break-ins,’ and you talk to somebody on Dixwell and they say, ‘I’m really worried that the kids here have very little to do.’
“I think there’s more we can do to bring those conversations together and have folks acknowledge that they’re the same conversation,” Winter said.
(Click here and on the above video for information about Winter’s work as an early-adopter video tracker for 2010 gubernatorial candidate Ned Lamont.)
Does one or both of the candidates have any direct or peripheral ties to the BOA majority union coalition?